Sometimes the only way to know what people think is to ask. As technology allows us to survey our teams online, there may be a reluctance to take the time for more detailed investigation. I recently asked every person on our library and archives teams to sit down with me and answer a question: “the amount of stress in my job is not a problem.” The results were interesting.
Until this role, I moved from library to library pretty regularly. One of the first things I’d do with any team was to sit down with them individually and talk. We’d talk about their role, how they fit into the library, flesh out some of the oddities that each library has.
I like this approach because, particularly when there are layers of management, it can be hard to get to the beating heart of a library operation. People sometimes say what they think the director wants to hear. Or think that something isn’t important enough to raise. One benefit of going to law school is a comfort in asking open ended questions and seeing where they go. One benefit of working in libraries is becoming a better listener and hearing things that prompt new questions.
Wrong Materials, Right Lessons
Frankly, I hadn’t planned on doing these meetings. We’d gone through an employee engagement process last year and the teams seemed fine. I say seemed because it was an online survey and it’s not really much help. Staff are asked periodically to answer questions that may or may not mean the same thing to each person. Additionally, survey output is anonymous so you can’t tell within a team where the problem lies. My archival team is so small, their responses aren’t even reported out because of concerns about being identified. It becomes a metric that has no meaning.
That’s a good lesson for me. I’d relied on the surveys not so much because I thought they were helpful but because they didn’t raise any particular issues. They reinforced the informal interactions I had with managers and staff. High performing teams that appear engaged on paper get less attention than teams that have problems. Lesson re-learned.
There can be a preference for surveys as a quick way to get feedback. But we’ve been doing a lot of online surveying recently and I think that the frequency has a negative impact on responsiveness. The questions are also only useful if the surveyed understand what they mean and why they’re being asked. This isn’t always the case.
My manager asked me to dig into the engagement results. Not because they’re an issue but as a check-the-box exercise to show that some follow up happened. An effective approach would have been to get the external support the survey suggested would improve my team’s engagement. But that’s an inherent problem when the engagement is seen as a team issue: a manager only has the tools and resources within her team.
You Need Time … and Trust
The easy path would have been an online survey asking a couple of more focused questions. But I only have 20 people reporting up to me and an online survey seemed penny wise, pound foolish. Sure it would be efficient to do, but it probably wouldn’t get me meaningful information.
I took an engagement survey question about stress as the talking point. Do you agree or disagree: “the amount of stress in my job is not a problem.” Whether you like the question or not (I think it sounds clunky, more so after asking 20 people), I wanted to keep that link to the survey.
Every staff person got an email from me, asking them to set up a meeting using Outlook at a time that was convenient to them and for the amount of time they wanted to talk: could be a couple minutes or longer. I set a 2 week window to enable people to schedule around lunches, holidays, reference desk commitments, etc. Also, if you avoid useless meetings clogging up your schedule, you have plenty of time for these more meaningful interactions.
I saw this as having a couple of benefits:
- meeting with me was not like meeting with a direct manager. This wasn’t going to have performance implications for staff.
- meeting outside of the normal reporting relationship (except for my 4 line managers) meant I could aggregate some of the responses so there was a degree of anonymity. But face-to-face meant I knew where the pain points were happening, on which teams.
Trust is an over-arching issue. If you are in a low-trust environment or have not yet developed trust, I think these meetings can help if you (a) listen and (b) use the input to try to solve problems. Listening tours that have no results only reinforce trust issues, but I think these could be really useful for trust building in newly created teams (or for newly made managers).
One concern my manager raised was whether the staff would resist it, since our corporate culture values anonymity in these sorts of activities. I think that underscores an organizational trust problem. I didn’t think it would be a problem on my teams and it doesn’t seem to have been. Certainly everyone participated and seemed open to talk.
Pulse Rate
Not surprising, there were mixed responses to the stress question. Some people said they weren’t stressed but had frustrations Some people said they were stressed but by macro issues (the future of law libraries, the lack of preparedness of researchers).
A key outcome: pretty much all frustrations or stress came from a concern that staff couldn’t deliver high levels of customer service because of an issue.
In a way, these meetings confirmed the question from the survey. But they also highlighted issues that are on the horizon that would not have surfaced from any survey until we’d reached them. Taking the staff’s pulse means we can better prepare for some of them.
My managers and I are going to meet and discuss how to proceed: what we can do, what externalities we can impact, what we have to just weather. The final step will be to loop back to the staff, and let them know that they were heard and the actions that we are going to be taking in response.
And I’m going to plan to do this exercise more frequently in the future. My current team is long-standing and stable, so maybe every other year. But I could see an annual check-in – separate from performance management – occurring with newer or on teams with more turnover. It’s an easy addition to a law library director’s strategic toolkit.